Aural Aggravation

Rare Vitamin Records – 23rd August 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Ramping up the anticipation for their upcoming album, hot on the heels of ‘O God’, The Battery Farm slam down a second single in the form of ‘Hail Mary’. One of the physical formats happens to be a rather nifty mini-CD. I’m rather partial to these as objects – so much so that I released a double-pack of EPs on 3” CD recently. Back when CDs singles were a standard format – and more often than not as a standard and limited edition, alongside a 7”, 12”, and cassette single, back in the early 90s at the peak of releasing as many formats as was humanly conceivable in order to milk fans and maximise copies sold for chart placement – the mini CD offered a format that was both practical and novel: with a capacity of around twenty-three minutes, they provided just the right amount of playing surface and so not only seemed less wasteful than a 5” disc with its seventy-odd minutes space, but they looked dinky, too. The challenge was always how to package them, though: I have 3” singles by The Sisters of Mercy from the late 80s in 5” jewel cases, complete with plastic adaptors for those whose CD player trays didn’t have a 3” divot, although this sort of seemed to defeat the object of the object, if you get my point, while the ‘battery pack’ style limited editions of the singles from the second album by Garbage were as stupid as they were cool, inasmuch as to play the things, you had to trash the packaging – which was probably the idea as an artistic wheeze, presenting fans and collectors with the dilemma of whether to play or preserve it (or buy two).

Of course, while presentation matters, it’s ultimately the content that counts, and with ‘Hail Mary’, The Battery Farm continue the trajectory of ‘O God’, with some sparse, jittery, slightly mathy instrumentation providing a tension-building lead-in before things kick in hard with a fat, buzzing bass around the mid-point.

‘Get this thing the fuck away from me,’ Benjamin Corry snarls with in a thick northern accent, dripping with vitriol, his throat full of phlegm and gravel, and in no time at all, the anguished vocals are spluttering out through a whirling cacophony of noise. It hits like a punch in the guts, and every spittle-flecked syllable feels like it’s being coughed up from the furthermost recesses of Corry’s soul. And yet, amidst it all, there’s a nagging riff, thumping beat you can really get down to, and even a snippet of backing vocal adding a bit of harmony.

For The Battery Farm, B-sides represent an opportunity to explore and experiment, and ‘2 Shackwell Road’ is no exception, with a collage of vocal samples looping across a stammering drum ‘n’ bass beat which gives way to a low-end rumble and occasional blasts of industrial noise. The result is strange and disturbing.

Taken together, the two singles thus far likely give us a fair indication of what we can expect from the album, Dark Web, due in November. It threatens something stark, uncomfortable, a psychologically demanding set of songs which go deep into dark territories, and promises to be their strongest work to date.

AA